Instructors

Jake Williams

Jake Williams is a Principal Consultant at Rendition Infosec. He has more than a decade of experience in secure network design, penetration testing, incident response, forensics, and malware reverse engineering. Before founding Rendition Infosec, Jake worked with various cleared government agencies in information security roles.

Jake is the co-author of the SANS FOR610 course (Malware Reverse Engineering) and the FOR526 course (Memory Forensics). He is also a contributing author for the SEC760 course (Advanced Exploit Development). In addition to teaching these courses, Jake also teaches a number of other forensics and security courses. He is well versed in Cloud Forensics and previously developed a cloud forensics course for a US Government client.

Jake regularly responds to cyber intrusions performed by state-sponsored actors in financial, defense, aerospace, and healthcare sectors using cutting edge forensics and incident response techniques. He often develops custom tools to deal with specific incidents and malware reversing challenges.

Additionally, Jake performs exploit development and has privately disclosed a multitude of zero day exploits to vendors and clients. Why perform exploit development? It's because metasploit != true penetration testing. He found vulnerabilities in one of the state counterparts to healthcare.gov and recently exploited antivirus software to perform privilege escalation.

Jake has spoken at Blackhat, Shmoocon, CEIC, B-Sides, DC3, as well as numerous SANS Summits and government conferences. He is also a two-time victor at the annual DC3 Digital Forensics Challenge. Jake used this experience with, and love of, CTF events to design the critically acclaimed NetWars challenges for the SANS malware reversing and memory forensics courses. Jake also speaks at private engagements and has presented security topics to a number of Fortune 100 executives.

Jake developed Dropsmack, a pentesting tool (okay, malware) that performs command and control and data exfiltration over cloud file sharing services. Jake also developed an anti-forensics tool for memory forensics, Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). This tool demonstrated weaknesses in memory forensics techniques.